12766. History Facts

In Sparta, Greece, in 600 BCE the law required that a child born imperfect – disabled or deformed – be killed immediately.

12767. History Facts

Birching was allowed as a punishment in Britain until the 1940s. It consisted of being beaten on the bare buttocks with a bunch of twigs.

12768. History Facts

Toad-eaters were people employed by men selling medicine at fairs and markets.The toad-eater had to swallow a toad – supposed to be deadly poisonous – and then take the medicine.Their survival encouraged people to buy the medicine.They may or may not have actually swallowed the toads…

12769. History Facts

In Ancient Egypt, women kept a cone of grease on their head. During the day, it melted in the hot sun and dripped down, making their hair gleam with grease.

12770. History Facts

Victorian child chimney sweeps sometimes had to crawl through chimneys as narrow as 18 centimetres (7 inches). If they didn't go quickly enough, their bare feet were pricked with burning straws.

12771. History Facts

Mary Stuart, queen of England from 1553 to 1558, had 274 people burned at the stake just for being Protestant Christians.

12772. History Facts

In 1856, the USA passed a law saying that its citizens could claim any uninhabited island anywhere in the world if it contained large deposits of bird faeces.

12773. History Facts

In the 1990s, fashionable women in Europe who wanted to look thin wore corsets laced so tightly that their ribs were sometimes broken!

12774. History Facts

In the nineteenth century, a school headmaster in York, England, massacred his pupils and hid their bodies in cupboards.

12775. History Facts

During the Great Plague that struck England in 1665–66, boys at Eton school were punished for not smoking – smoking was thought to protect them from the disease.

12776. History Facts

Before written or computerized records helped us to keep track of criminals, many countries marked criminals with a tattoo or a branding iron – a red hot iron used to burn a pattern, letter or picture into their skin.This meant that everyone could see what they had done.

12777. History Facts

Bird faeces called guano were collected and sold from Peru, Chile and Bolivia for hundreds of years. It was used as a fertilizer for plants.

12778. History Facts

A common way of attacking a besieged castle or city in the Middle Ages was to catapult dead animals, corpses or even the heads of enemies over the walls.

12779. History Facts

The Greek emperor Draco died when he was smothered by the hats and cloaks that admirers threw over him at a party.

12780. History Facts

Pope Clement VII tried eating a death cap toadstool in 1534; it killed him.

12781. History Facts

In 2,350 BC the Mesopotamian king Urukagina demanded that thieves be stoned to death with stones carved with their crime.

12782. History Facts

It took over two months to make an Egyptian mummy. After removing the internal organs and brain, the body was covered with a kind of salt for two months to dry out, then treated with resin, packed with sand and sawdust and wrapped in bandages.

12783. History Facts

Mongol leader Tamerlane the Great (1336–1405) executed anyone who told him a joke he had already heard.

12784. History Facts

Roman prisoners condemned to fight to death with each other or wild animals often tried to kill themselves before the fight. One man pushed a wooden spike down his throat – it was used for holding the sponge people cleaned themselves with in the lavatory.

12785. History Facts

Anglo-Saxon peasants sometimes wove clothes made out of dried stinging nettles.

Fact
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